Listen, Shut Up, DICE Are NOT A Battlefield Factory

Share this:

As the decidedly not very good Medal Of Honor: WARFACEFIGHTER received its critical pannings, one refrain was repeated again and again: they’re the games EA puts out on the year’s DICE don’t have a new Battlefield ready. That may well be true, but EA are now at pains to point out (not necessarily in reaction, I should say) that DICE are not “a Battlefield factory”. (Imagine a non-gamer reading those words. “Dice are not battlefield factories? And you say FPS games HELP your minds?”) There’s more to the Swedish team, they insist to OXM today. And in response rumours that Mirror’s Edge 2 is in development have once more bubbled to the surface.

Did anyone say they were? Was it you? That was mean, because they’re not. They also make… you know, they also do… oh yeah, Mirror’s Edge! EA Games’ VP, Patrick Soderlund, told OXM that it’s important for the team of 300 to have other non-BF projects on the go, or they could get fed up, and as he puts it, “we don’t want to become a Battlefield factory.” Which rather asks the question, but aren’t they?

In fact, take a look at their release history, and – well – theysuredolooklikeabattlefieldfactory. Since 2005 the only thing they’ve released that wasn’t BF was indeed Mirror’s Edge, the parkour-ish but-actually-spoiled-by-stupid-guns-for-no-reason runny, climby game that everyone wants a sequel for anyway. Before that was the well-liked Rallisport Challenge 2 for the original Xbox, then you’re back to 2003 for Midtown Madness 3, with just Battlefields and Battlefield expansions in between. If there are portions of the team working on non-BF games, then where are they?! Sequels for Shrek Extra Large on Gamecube, perhaps? Finally the follow up to 2001’s Diva Starz: Mall Mania?

See, I’m teasing, because actually it’s okay that they’re the Battlefield factory! They’re hardly doing a bad job, are they? The consistently make really brilliant Battlefield games. They should be proud of that. And you have to say, with no other IP released in over four years, and none scheduled for release in the future (with Battlefield 4 likely for next Christmas), um, the evidence they’re otherwise is scant. Except!

Except, after the OXM story did the rounds earlier today, former DICE studio manager, Ben Cousins, tweeted giving the game away on Mirror’s Edge 2. He said,

“It is general knowledge in the Stockholm dev scene that Mirror’s Edge 2 is in production at DICE.”

It’s gossip, certainly. But it’s the sort of gossip that is likely true. (Former devs and current devs remain friends, and talk shop all the time. I remember once, many years ago, being asked by some former LucasArts developers if I’d seen the new Monkey Island 4 game that the studio was then developing. The PR guy with us went white, his forehead hit the table, and hilarity ensued. I believe PC Gamer’s The Spy mentioned it in the following issue. That is a VERY old story – I am a VERY old man.)

So there it is. They’re not a Battlefield factory, because they might be making a Mirror’s Edge sequel.

83 Comments

DICE and BF are dead as far as im concerned. I accepted and enjoyed BC2 because it was a console franchise(up until i got bored of its unchallenging and boring console focus designs like all console shooters), but BF3 was supposed to be a true BF finally for the PC gamers and instead it turned about to be just another console shooter. DICE’s admittance to it being switched to console focus a week after release was the confirmation i needed to shake off the bad feelings i had about the game and quit it. Luckily a friend let me use his account early on so no money was wasted

The only issues I have right know is: “When will my Origin account get hacked? Or did they hack it already?!” I don’t know, I didn’t check. Maybe I should, but I don’t care enough. It’s only a matter of time.

I can’t hear you over the sound of this sheer amazing sound design in this most cinematic multiplayer experience I’ve ever played. BF3 is, to me, the state of the art in the fps genre. It’s just sad that it’s overshadowed by Origin and restrictive modding policy.

Yeah lucky you who did not waste any moneh. Me however, really enjoy BF3, but Battlelog and Origin has been a constant headache for me throughout this games lifetime. And I’m not alone, I bet they have atleast one server dedicated for the “bugs and issues” thread on the forums, called the whinetank. Because it tanks the whine so to speak while they manage to no read or fix anything. I loved the “disconnected” bug pre-armored kill, it was thoroughly ignored until one day. On that day a admin on the forums blamed punbuster. I went to the punkbuster forums, they blamed the developers. Nice. Nice indeed.
So the game is f’king good, but the fluff around it sucks arse.

I love when big companys leave their PR guys roaming free, and they start trowing this sort of quotes thinking that everybody is just as dumb,

I mean the phrase is of course trying to say not so subtely, “hey we are not like those guys, those evil guys, the Activision guys, we actually enforce creativity so you should love us and give us more money”,
but, yeap, looking at what they are doing with Bioware, or Visceral, or…

But nothing is actually confirmed aside from the possibility of it running on Frostbite 2. It’s all reports of it being cancelled, restarting the project or EA constantly focus testing without getting satisfying results.

Also, please drop the condescension. It won’t help you get your point across any better.

That’s EXACTLY the list of games that DICE made (from their official site) in last 10 years. “Not a Battlefield factory”? Oh yeah, managers at EA are just hilarious. OMG, it’s so funny. Funny, right? Anyone?…

Doesn’t look quite as bad, especially for a 300 person team. Certainly not churning out the Battlefields the way Activision churns out CoD, which is what I suspect he was getting defensive about, i.e. we won’t be seeing a new mainline Battlefield every other year.

You know, its funny looking at that list and realizing that a BF game has come out pretty much every other year. But unlike certain other franchises, it doesn’t feel that way to me at all.

It’s probably because I only got into 1942 near the end, mostly skipped BF: Vietnam(it was fun, but I just never played it much), absorbed copious amounts of BF2, and skipped 2142 entirely. I also skipped Modern Combat because it was just BF2 for xbox, and Bad Company because it was console-only. I then bought, but barely played, Bad Company 2 because on release the PC version was just a totally broken game which they refused to acknowledge bugs about and were balancing based on console player stats. So you ended up with helicopters that couldn’t maneuver, were slow, and had to contend with tracers/anti-air that flew at light speed and which couldn’t be countered because flares didn’t work. And then, when presented with this fact, the dev on the forums basically said “you’re doing it wrong” until a video was posted of it not working. Then he changed his statement to what amounted to “It works on consoles. Sucks for you guys.” I quit playing then and there, and that was maybe three weeks to a month after launch. A friend of mine told me that the game got a lot better later, but I never went back. I played it on the consoles once at another friend’s house, also shortly after launch, and was amazed at how much differently the game played. I suppose it’s to be expected since Bad Company 2 was always supposed to be console-focused, but I’m still bitter that they could release the PC version in the state that it was in.

But I have enjoyed BF3. A friend that I used to play BF2 with bought it for me, and I dropped the cash for “Premium” after figuring out that I liked it. It’s not BF2, not by a long shot, and it needs to have certain things fixed or added, like bombs on jets, but it’s good enough. However, I’m not looking forward to BF4, as I feel that it’s too soon and it’s probably going to go a long way towards destroying the BF3 playerbase. Unless it’s along the lines of 2142 and goes to a far-future setting rather than doing the near-future thing that I have a feeling it’s going to do.

I get that a good, balanced team can take down a jet easily enough in theory. But the problem is in smaller games, either you have half your team dedicated to anti air, or you try to ignore the jet. Any one vehicle shouldn’t be powerful enough to dominate a whole team.

In all the time that I’ve been playing, starting in late November of last year, the only air support I’ve ever gotten from random players is with choppers. I never see anyone that isn’t a friend of mine and in the same mumble server as me using jets for anything resembling CAS. The jets just fly around shooting at each other, or strafing the enemy base to prevent their jets from lifting off. In BF2 I could at least throw up a request for a bombing run on a certain point and I would have about a 50/50 chance of getting it because people liked using the bombs. Practically no one seems to use anything but the AA missiles on the jets in BF3.

Maybe if they hadn’t made the jets into a slap-together loadout and had them always be equipped with everything, or at least always have flares/AA missiles and still at least 2 options for your loadout, then it would be different. But they decided that jets have to be set up one way or the other, and it’s ridiculous. It’s not like a real jet couldn’t fit two air-to-surface missiles, a handful of air-to-air missiles, two rocket pods, flares, and an active radar system in real life because they routinely do that kind of thing in real life. The F/A-18E that they use in BF3 has 11 mounting hardpoints capable of holding almost 18,000lbs of ordinance, and the Su-35 is almost the exact same, so it’s not hard to see how they can pull that off.

Or, better yet, they could have just added in a fighter-bomber style aircraft and replaced one of the fighters on each map with it. For the US it could be the F/A-18F, which is the two-seat fighter-bomber variant of the F/A-18E. For the Russians it could be the Su-30. Make them less maneuverable than the fighter versions, give them a longer reload time on AA missiles, and make the bombs have a reload time approaching a minute or so. That way they couldn’t just keep strafing an area with bombs and would have to disengage from the fight for a while.

And if they didn’t want to add in new jets, they could have just replaced one of each fighter with an A-10 and a Su-25, and given them a compliment of bombs in Conquest mode. They’re slower than the fighters, can’t maneuver as well, and while they’re better armored they’re not as able to defend themselves against air threats. Plus they have the added benefit of looking radically different than the fighters, which my previous suggestions didn’t have, so people hopping into them would know what they’re getting into and wouldn’t expect them to fly as well as the other jets. And they’re designed from the outset for a CAS role.

There are ways that DICE could have retained the CAS role for jets without making it some super-powered god-being role. But instead they decided to make jets into something that can’t perform CAS for crap, and so people just completely avoid doing it.

We will, in fact, be seeing a Battlefield every other year. 2009 was BC2, 2011 was BF3 and BF4 is confirmed for 2013. BF3 sold something like 15 million copies so don’t kid yourself into thinking that EA won’t milk it for all it’s worth. They alternate with the MOH games but given the reception of the last one, I wouldn’t be surprised if they went looking for another team or a DICE staff expansion to push out a Battlefield every year.

Not a whole open world probably, Hub-based mission structure where you return to a fairly large and open-ended area to take quests or roam around. At least that’s what I want from a future ME game when it comes to level design.

Oh, I figured, but my immediate thought is something along the lines of “how would I get open world to work?” It would be seriously difficult to keep the flowing gameplay of ME without much constraint on the game world, but if DICE somehow managed to pull it off it would be absolutely amazing. Not that I think they’re (or anyone else, really) even going to try.

GTA games model an entire city. Plus, I see it as being essential for the fabric of a parkour game. Parkour is as much about experimentation and knowledge as it is about actually going at pace. If you could slowly and gradually learn routes in a familiar area, and then have the pressure to execute them faster and faster, more intelligently (ending up at a higher point, planning for a three point route and taking the best way round) it would completely capture what it means to free run while creating a sufficient structure for the game-based requirements.

My only concern is how you structure time pressure into the game without sticking a clock somewhere on the screen. They chose ‘you will get shot’ for the first game and it was simply ugly. Something like Dishonoured’s first and second level make me thing that a persistent world platformer might simply be enough if each return to a familiar area is met with new changes and tweaks as enemy or other forces make the environment change. World of Warcraft have even shown this zoning can happen without a loading screen. You could run a route you know and then return to discover a bridge you relied on has been blown up. Or whatever.

TL;DR: I want this game to happen very much, non focused ramblings on design.

I didn’t find ME to be particularly linear. Most areas had a few obvious routes, then there were a few faster ones that weren’t always immediately obvious and required some mastery of the parkour system. I’d echo the desire for ME2, in any case.

BF3 was entertaining for a while, but it was just cod with slightly better variety and graphics… most of it was just simple mindless run & gun which gets old fast. In past BF games (even bad company 2 for me) victories, and close defeats felt like true achievements, and there wasa better sense of teamplay even with random teammates, while BF3 was just about running around fragging noobs near flags (and most players are absolutely terrible, posing no challenge as enemies and no aid as allies) The average skill and intelligence level of the players are by far the lowest I’ve ever experienced in an MP, game.. then again I haven’t played CoD in a long while.

Removing the most fun aspect of BC2, the destruction was also a big letdown for me, especially because it was agressively advertised how bf3’s destruction would be so much more advanced, HD, unparalelled.. and all those shitty marketing buzzwords. Going straight through walls, and blowing entire buildings on top of enemies made you feel like a real badass in BC2. That was probably the only good it did to the BF franchise.

Yeah almost forgot that after like a month, 90% of the playerbase was playing metro with 64 players 24/7. Its basically a continuous chain of explosions in a tunnel with zero thinking involved, yet its your only choice if you want to see more than 5 people on a server… battlefield is truly dead.

That’s a pretty ridiculous exaggeration, don’t you think? Yes, 24/7 Metro servers are popular, just like 2Fort servers are popular, just like Nuketown servers are popular, just like no-vehicle Karkard servers were popular. Saying that it’s the only thing people play is a rather unjustified criticism. Finding a not-Metro server to play on was beyond trivial, and on pretty much every server I’ve played on people start leaving if it switches to Metro.

Apparently you never discovered how server filters work. Granted, it’s getting harder to find servers that run a full rotation of every map but you can find them. And I only play on the so-called “hardcore” servers, of which there are less than the normal variety. But then again, I remember it being fairly hard to find full-rotation servers for BF2 as well. There were a lot of servers that were 24/7 Wake, 24/7 Karkand, 24/7 Jalalabad, etc. and servers that did rotations like Karkand/Jalalabad/Mashtuur, but very few played every map in the game.

So I won’t say that Battlefield is dead, but I will say that it is dying. One of my big gripes about BF3 is the way they handled the jets, and I’m no good at flying. Jets have to be set up either to fight ground forces, or to fight other air assets, with little in-between unless you’re good with the gun. And then, when you’re set up for ground attack you’re still pretty well useless because rockets don’t do jack-all for damage and have terrible splash, and the guided missile takes forever to lock on and can’t actually 1-shot anything, not even a humvee. Bombs may have been really powerful in BF2, but at the same time there wasn’t near as much anti-air capability as there is now, and I’d rather have enemy jets bomb me into the ground than see no air support at all, which is how it plays out now. And they need to bring back the 2-seater jets. I’m not a good pilot, my friend is. I want to be able to hop into a jet with him and act as his bombardier. In BF2 we had 5 bombs in the F-15, and we made bombing runs like that all the time. But I suppose they did away with the 2-seaters because they got rid of the bombs, and I suppose they got rid of the bombs because they made vehicles have unlimited ammo, and they couldn’t be having someone drop 2-5 bombs every 20 seconds.

I’ve never had rockets on a jet give me a disable on a fully-repaired armored vehicle unless it was sitting in the open with absolutely no cover anywhere near by and it didn’t move while I was shooting at it. That’s a rare situation. And the guided missile takes 2 hits to disable a full-health armored vehicle as well. Hell, it takes 2 hits to actually kill an unarmored vehicle. It should, at the very least, immediately destroy any vehicle that’s humvee-level or below, because those things are little better than a passenger car. Humvees have a little bit of armor, but from speaking with people who have been in both Iraq wars, it’s nowhere near what BF3 would have you expect. And the DPVs/Growlers/etc have no armor because they’re open framed vehicles. But you drop a guided missile on them and it doesn’t kill the crew, and only disables the vehicle.

And then you get into another gripe of mine about the game – the level of armor on certain vehicles. Namely the IFVs. They take as many hits as a tank to bring down, and that just should not be the case. IFVs are armored enough to keep out small-arms fire and withstand a couple rocket attacks, but a tank should tear them to shreds pretty quickly. This is especially frustrating in the Armored Kill DLC because the tank destroyers are quite literally IFVs with tank guns strapped to them. The American one is an LAV-III with an Abrams cannon on it, while the Sprut is a BMD-3 with an equivalent to the T-90’s gun on it. They’re supposed to be fast and able to run circles around an MBT and do stuff like hit and run attacks, but if the MBT scores a hit they should go up pretty quickly. Instead, you get MBTs and TDs going head-to-head in stationary positions and the MBT losing. That just should not happen.

It is not only a ridicilous exxegeration – it is dead wrong. I have Battlelog open right now, have set it’s server filter up to show me server with 10 free slots or less (including full ones), and these are the maps I am getting:

The people that used to play Battlefield 3 for just Metro are long gone, if they ever were there (I bought it in February). You are actually quite lucky to find that map in any rotation right now. Most people don't play it anymore.

That’s odd. I would have thought the proper reply to “You’re a Battlefield factory” was “What’s that? I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over all the ringing cash registers!” Maybe I just don’t understand PR. :-/

I’m pretty sure you can’t pirate software you’ve already bought. Like, it’s breaking the EULA (or getting someone else to do it for you, in reality), but I’m pretty sure that by definition if you bought the software license then no matter where you download it from you aren’t pirating. Although perhaps it counts since you’re breaking the licensing agreement, and therefore can lose the license? EULAs haven’t really been tested in court much anyways.

I’ve been throwing money at my monitor since 2008 and still no sign of Mirror’s Edge 2. They keep dropping the name in every single interview, which reminds me of how it is with Beyond Good and Evil 2.

Sometimes I suspect they’re doing that only because they know there’s this dedicated group of people who just fucking love the game, that a great deal of those people are running gaming sites and that dropping the name means they’ll get their name up all over the internets.

“the parkour-ish but-actually-spoiled-by-stupid-guns-for-no-reason ”
Actually, the game is pretty much perfect as it is, and I love both the platforming and the combat. I don’t like the combat in FPS games, but knowing that I’m not supposed to fight, and that I’m supposed to complete the game without firing a bullet allows me to relax and enjoy combat like never before.